This refers to the news item ‘Reach out to people of J&K’ (DE August 20). Expression of sympathy by the Congress chief to the people of the valley is feigned and hypocritical. It is a fraud on the people of the valley. Congress is in power at the Centre and partner in the ruling coalition in the State. Firing at the protesting crowds in Kashmir has taken place with its full and tacit consent. The Congress High Command ensured that its protégé CM in J&K is not destabilized. How then will an ordinary Kashmir be convinced that the Congress chief has an iota of sympathy for him and that her expressions are sincere? The generation that has grown up “under the shadow of brutality and conflict” – in the words of the Congress chief, has been dragged to that fate by the ruling Congress and none else because it unleashed their suppression during last six decades in general and two previous decades in particular. The youth of valley, nay the entire people of the valley want Pakistan via azaadi, for which the Indian establishment has only one answer and that is the bullet. If the Congress chief sincerely wants to “reach out to the people of the J&K State”, the path is through conceding their demand. Otherwise it is a cruel joke to call them”our very own.” Dignified and cultured society never meets out punitive and scurvy treatment to “very own people”. If the Congress chief wanted to be sincere and honest to the people of the valley, to the entire Indian nation and to herself, she should not have minced words but called a spade by its proper name. She should have said with full confidence and authority that the Indian State will not let separatism and secession happen; that the Indian State will uphold secularism and democratic dispensation come what may as it did in three previous wars with Pakistan. But by not speaking the hard truth, the inference is that the Congress chief has no conviction either in India’s secularaism or democratic dispensation. She seeks appeasemnt at any cost including the credibility of her party.